Middle Eastern Realities

Bruce BawerAn Anatomy of SurrenderMotivated by fear and multiculturalism, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping sharia.Spring 2008

Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.

What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, KhoÂ­meini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.

The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia. Often their approach is to argue that we’re the bad guys. After the late Dutch sociologist-turned-politician Pim Fortuyn sounded the alarm about the danger that Europe’s Islamization posed to democracy, elite journalists labeled him a threat. A New York Times headline described him as marching the dutch to the right. Dutch newspapers Het Parool and De Volkskrant compared him with Mussolini; Trouw likened him to Hitler. The man (a multiculturalist, not a Muslim) who murdered him in May 2002 seemed to echo such verdicts when explaining his motive: Fortuyn’s views on Islam, the killer insisted, were “dangerous.”

Perhaps no Western media outlet has exhibited this habit of moral inversion more regularly than the BBC. In 2006, to take a typical example, Manchester’s top imam told psychotherapist John Casson that he supported the death penalty for homosexuality. Casson expressed shock—and the BBC, in a dispatch headlined imam accused of “gay death” slur, spun the controversy as an effort by Casson to discredit Islam. The BBC concluded its story with comments from an Islamic Human Rights Commission spokesman, who equated Muslim attitudes toward homosexuality with those of “other orthodox religions, such as Catholicism” and complained that focusing on the issue was “part of demonizing Muslims.”

In June 2005, the BBC aired the documentary Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, which sought to portray concerns about Islamic radicalism as overblown. This “stunning whitewash of radical Islam,” as Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson put it, “helped keep the British public fast asleep, a few weeks before the bombs went off in London subways and buses” in July 2005. In December 2007, it emerged that five of the documentary’s subjects, served up on the show as examples of innocuous Muslims-next-door, had been charged in those terrorist attacks—and that BBC producers, though aware of their involvement after the attacks took place, had not reported important information about them to the police.

Press acquiescence to Muslim demands and threats is endemic. When the Mohammed cartoons—published in September 2005 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten to defy rising self-censorship after van Gogh’s murder—were answered by worldwide violence, only one major American newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, joined such European dailies as Die Welt and El País in reprinting them as a gesture of free-speech solidarity. Editors who refused to run the images claimed that their motive was multicultural respect for Islam. Critic Christopher Hitchens believed otherwise, writing that he “knew quite a number of the editors concerned and can say for a certainty that the chief motive for ‘restraint’ was simple fear.” Exemplifying the new dhimmitude, whatever its motivation, was Norway’s leading cartoonist, Finn Graff, who had often depicted Israelis as Nazis, but who now vowed not to draw anything that might provoke Muslim wrath. (On a positive note, this February, over a dozen Danish newspapers, joined by a number of other papers around the world, reprinted one of the original cartoons as a free-speech gesture after the arrest of three people accused of plotting to kill the artist.)

Last year brought another cartoon crisis—this time over Swedish artist Lars Vilks’s drawings of Mohammed as a dog, which ambassadors from Muslim countries used as an excuse to demand speech limits in Sweden. CNN reporter Paula Newton suggested that perhaps “Vilks should have known better” because of the Jyllands-Posten incident—as if people who make art should naturally take their marching orders from people who make death threats. Meanwhile, The Economist depicted Vilks as an eccentric who shouldn’t be taken “too seriously” and noted approvingly that Sweden’s prime minister, unlike Denmark’s, invited the ambassadors “in for a chat.”

The elite media regularly underreport fundamentalist Muslim misbehavior or obfuscate its true nature. After the knighting of Rushdie in 2007 unleashed yet another wave of international Islamist mayhem, Tim Rutten wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “If you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it’s because there haven’t been any.” Or consider the riots that gripped immigrant suburbs in France in the autumn of 2005. These uprisings were largely assertions of Muslim authority over Muslim neighborhoods, and thus clearly jihadist in character. Yet weeks passed before many American press outlets mentioned them—and when they did, they de-emphasized the rioters’ Muslim identity (few cited the cries of “Allahu akbar,” for instance). Instead, they described the violence as an outburst of frustration over economic injustice.

When polls and studies of Muslims appear, the media often spin the results absurdly or drop them down the memory hole after a single news cycle. Journalists celebrated the results of a 2007 Pew poll showing that 80 percent of American Muslims aged 18 to 29 said that they opposed suicide bombing—even though the flip side, and the real story, was that a double-digit percentage of young American Muslims admitted that they supported it. u.s. muslims assimilated, opposed to extremism, the Washington Post rejoiced, echoing USA Today’s american muslims reject extremes. A 2006 Daily Telegraph survey showed that 40 percent of British Muslims wanted sharia in Britain—yet British reporters often write as though only a minuscule minority embraced such views.

After each major terrorist act since 9/11, the press has dutifully published stories about Western Muslims fearing an “anti-Muslim backlash”—thus neatly shifting the focus from Islamists’ real acts of violence to non-Muslims’ imaginary ones. (These backlashes, of course, never materialize.) While books by Islam experts like Bat Ye’or and Robert Spencer, who tell difficult truths about jihad and sharia, go unreviewed in newspapers like the New York Times, the elite press legitimizes thinkers like Karen Armstrong and John Esposito, whose sugarcoated representations of Islam should have been discredited for all time by 9/11. The Times described Armstrong’s hagiography of Mohammed as “a good place to start” learning about Islam; in July 2007, the Washington Post headlined a piece by Esposito want to understand islam? start here.

Mainstream outlets have also served up anodyne portraits of fundamentalist Muslim life. Witness Andrea Elliott’s affectionate three-part profile of a Brooklyn imam, which appeared in the New York Times in March 2006. Elliott and the Times sought to portray Reda Shata as a heroic bridge builder between two cultures, leaving readers with the comforting belief that the growth of Islam in America was not only harmless but positive, even beautiful. Though it emerged in passing that Shata didn’t speak English, refused to shake women’s hands, wanted to forbid music, and supported Hamas and suicide bombing, Elliott did her best to downplay such unpleasant details; instead, she focused on sympathetic personal particulars. “Islam came to him softly, in the rhythms of his grandmother’s voice”; “Mr. Shata discovered love 15 years ago. . . . ‘She entered my heart,‘ said the imam.” Elliott’s saccharine piece won a Pulitzer Prize. When Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes pointed out that Shata was obviously an Islamist, a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review dismissed Pipes as “right-wing” and insisted that Shata was “very moderate.”

So it goes in this upside-down, not-so-brave new media world: those who, if given the power, would subjugate infidels, oppress women, and execute apostates and homosexuals are “moderate” (a moderate, these days, apparently being anybody who doesn’t have explosives strapped to his body), while those who dare to call a spade a spade are “Islamophobes.”

The entertainment industry has been nearly as appalling. During World War II, Hollywood churned out scores of films that served the war effort, but today’s movies and TV shows, with very few exceptions, either tiptoe around Islam or whitewash it. In the whitewash category were two sitcoms that debuted in 2007, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Little Mosque on the Prairie and CW’s Aliens in America. Both shows are about Muslims confronting anti-Muslim bigotry; both take it for granted that there’s no fundamentalist Islam problem in the West, but only an anti-Islam problem.

Muslim pressure groups have actively tried to keep movies and TV shows from portraying Islam as anything but a Religion of Peace. For example, the Council for American-Islamic Relations successfully lobbied Paramount Pictures to change the bad guys in The Sum of All Fears (2002) from Islamist terrorists to neo-Nazis, while Fox’s popular series 24, after Muslims complained about a story line depicting Islamic terrorists, ran cringe-worthy public-service announcements emphasizing how nonviolent Islam was. Earlier this year, Iranian-Danish actor Farshad Kholghi noted that, despite the cartoon controversy’s overwhelming impact on Denmark, “not a single movie has been made about the crisis, not a single play, not a single stand-up monologue.” Which, of course, is exactly what the cartoon jihadists wanted.

In April 2006, an episode of the animated series South Park admirably mocked the wave of self-censorship that followed the Jyllands-Posten crisis—but Comedy Central censored it, replacing an image of Mohammed with a black screen and an explanatory notice. According to series producer Anne Garefino, network executives frankly admitted that they were acting out of fear. “We were happy,” she told an interviewer, “that they didn’t try to claim that it was because of religious tolerance.”

Then there’s the art world. Postmodern artists who have always striven to shock and offend now maintain piously that Islam deserves “respect.” Museums and galleries have quietly taken down paintings that might upset Muslims and have put into storage manuscripts featuring images of Mohammed. London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery removed life-size nude dolls by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer from a 2006 exhibit just before its opening; the official excuse was “space constraints,” but the curator admitted that the real reason was fear that the nudity might offend the gallery’s Muslim neighbors. Last November, after the cancellation of a show in The Hague of artworks depicting gay men in Mohammed masks, the artist, Sooreh Hera, charged the museum with giving in to Muslim threats. Tim Marlow of London’s White Cube Gallery notes that such self-censorship by artists and museums is now common, though “very few people have explicitly admitted” it. British artist Grayson Perry, whose work has mercilessly mocked Christianity, is one who has—and his reluctance isn’t about multicultural sensitivity. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art,” he told the Times of London, “is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”

Leading liberal intellectuals and academics have shown a striking willingness to betray liberal values when it comes to pacifying Muslims. Back in 2001, Unni Wikan, a distinguished Norwegian cultural anthropologist and Islam expert, responded to the high rate of Muslim-on-infidel rape in Oslo by exhorting women to “realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”

More recently, high-profile Europe experts Ian Buruma of Bard College and Timothy Garton Ash of Oxford, while furiously denying that they advocate cultural surrender, have embraced “accommodation,” which sounds like a distinction without a difference. In his book Murder in Amsterdam, Buruma approvingly quotes Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen’s call for “accommodation with the Muslims,” including those “who consciously discriminate against their women.” Sharia enshrines a Muslim man’s right to beat and rape his wife, to force marriages on his daughters, and to kill them if they resist. One wonders what female Muslims who immigrated to Europe to escape such barbarity think of this prescription.

Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and one of Britain’s best-known public intellectuals, suggested in February the institution of a parallel system of sharia law in Britain. Since the Islamic Sharia Council already adjudicates Muslim marriages and divorces in the U.K., what Williams was proposing was, as he put it, “a much enhanced and quite sophisticated version of such a body, with increased resources.” Gratifyingly, his proposal, short on specifics and long on academic doublespeak (“I don’t think,” he told the BBC, “that we should instantly spring to the conclusion that the whole of that world of jurisprudence and practice is somehow monstrously incompatible with human rights, simply because it doesn’t immediately fit with how we understand it”) was greeted with public outrage.

Another prominent accommodationist is humanities professor Mark Lilla of Columbia University, author of an August 2007 essay in the New York Times Magazine so long and languorous, and written with such perfect academic dispassion, that many readers may have finished it without realizing that it charted a path leading straight to sharia. Muslims’ “full reconciliation with modern liberal democracy cannot be expected,” Lilla wrote. For the West, “coping is the order of the day, not defending high principle.”

Revealing in this light is Buruma’s and Garton Ash’s treatment of author Ayaan Hirsi Ali—perhaps the greatest living champion of Western freedom in the face of creeping jihad—and of the Europe-based Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan. Because Hirsi Ali refuses to compromise on liberty, Garton Ash has called her a “simplistic . . . Enlightenment fundamentalist”—thus implicitly equating her with the Muslim fundamentalists who have threatened to kill her—while Buruma, in several New York Times pieces, has portrayed her as a petulant naif. (Both men have lately backed off somewhat.) On the other hand, the professors have rhapsodized over Ramadan’s supposed brilliance. They aren’t alone: though he’s clearly not the Westernized, urbane intellectual he seems to be—he refuses to condemn the stoning of adulteresses and clearly looks forward to a Europe under sharia—this grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and protégé of Islamist scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi regularly wins praise in bien-pensant circles as representing the best hope for long-term concord between Western Muslims and non-Muslims.

This spring, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, writing in the New York Times Magazine, actually gave two cheers for sharia. He contrasted it favorably with English common law, and described “the Islamists’ aspiration to renew old ideas of the rule of law” as “bold and noble.”

With the press, the entertainment industry, and prominent liberal thinkers all refusing to defend basic Western liberties, it’s not surprising that our political leaders have been pusillanimous, too. After a tiny Oslo newspaper, Magazinet, reprinted the Danish cartoons in early 2006, jihadists burned Norwegian flags and set fire to Norway’s embassy in Syria. Instead of standing up to the vandals, Norwegian leaders turned on Magazinet’s editor, VebjÃ¸rn Selbekk, partially blaming him for the embassy burning and pressing him to apologize. He finally gave way at a government-sponsored press conference, groveling before an assemblage of imams whose leader publicly forgave him and placed him under his protection. On that terrible day, Selbekk later acknowledged, “Norway went a long way toward allowing freedom of speech to become the Islamists’ hostage.” As if that capitulation weren’t disgrace enough, an official Norwegian delegation then traveled to Qatar and implored Qaradawi—a defender of suicide bombers and the murder of Jewish children—to accept Selbekk’s apology. “To meet Yusuf al-Qaradawi under the present circumstances,” Norwegian-Iraqi writer Walid al-Kubaisi protested, was “tantamount to granting extreme Islamists . . . a right of joint consultation regarding how Norway should be governed.”

The UN’s position on the question of speech versus “respect” for Islam was clear—and utterly at odds with its founding value of promoting human rights. “You don’t joke about other people’s religion,” Kofi Annan lectured soon after the Magazinet incident, echoing the sermons of innumerable imams, “and you must respect what is holy for other people.” In October 2006, at a UN panel discussion called “Cartooning for Peace,” Under Secretary General Shashi Tharoor proposed drawing “a very thin blue UN line . . . between freedom and responsibility.” (Americans might be forgiven for wondering whether that line would strike through the First Amendment.) And in 2007, the UN’s Human Rights Council passed a Pakistani motion prohibiting defamation of religion.

Other Western government leaders have promoted the expansion of the Dar al-Islam. In September 2006, when philosophy teacher Robert Redeker went into hiding after receiving death threats over a Le Figaro op-ed on Islam, France’s then–prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, commented that “everyone has the right to express their opinions freely—at the same time that they respect others, of course.” The lesson of the Redeker affair, he said, was “how vigilant we must be to ensure that people fully respect one another in our society.” Villepin got a run for his money last year from his Swedish counterpart, Fredrik Reinfeldt, who, after meeting with Muslim ambassadors to discuss the Vilks cartoons, won praise from one of them, Algeria’s Merzak Bedjaoui, for his “spirit of appeasement.”

When, years after September 11, President George W. Bush finally acknowledged publicly that the West was at war with Islamic fascism, Muslims’ and multiculturalists’ furious reaction made him retreat to the empty term “war on terror.” Britain’s Foreign Office has since deemed even that phrase offensive and banned its use by cabinet members (along with “Islamic extremism”). In January, the Home Office decided that Islamic terrorism would henceforth be described as “anti-Islamic activity.”

Western legislatures and courts have reinforced the “spirit of appeasement.” In 2005, Norway’s parliament, with virtually no public discussion or media coverage, criminalized religious insults (and placed the burden of proof on the defendant). Last year, that country’s most celebrated lawyer, Tor Erling Staff, argued that the punishment for honor killing should be less than for other murders, because it’s arrogant for us to expect Muslim men to conform to our society’s norms. Also in 2007, in one of several instances in which magistrates sworn to uphold German law have followed sharia instead, a Frankfurt judge rejected a Muslim woman’s request for a quick divorce from her brutally abusive husband; after all, under the Koran he had the right to beat her.

Those who dare to defy the West’s new sharia-based strictures and speak their minds now risk prosecution in some countries. In 2006, legendary author Oriana Fallaci, dying of cancer, went on trial in Italy for slurring Islam; three years earlier, she had defended herself in a French court against a similar charge. (Fallaci was ultimately found not guilty in both cases.) More recently, Canadian provinces ordered publisher Ezra Levant and journalist Mark Steyn to face human rights tribunals, the former for reprinting the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, the latter for writing critically about Islam in Maclean’s.

Even as Western authorities have hassled Islam’s critics, they’ve honored jihadists and their supporters. In 2005, Queen Elizabeth knighted Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain, a man who had called for the death of Salman Rushdie. Also that year, London mayor Ken Livingstone ludicrously praised Qaradawi as “progressive”—and, in response to gay activists who pointed out that Qaradawi had defended the death penalty for homosexuals, issued a dissertation-length dossier whitewashing the Sunni scholar and trying to blacken the activists’ reputations. Of all the West’s leaders, however, few can hold a candle to Piet Hein Donner, who in 2006, as Dutch minister of justice, said that if voters wanted to bring sharia to the Netherlands—where Muslims will soon be a majority in major cities—“it would be a disgrace to say, ‘This is not permitted!’ ”

If you don’t find the dhimmification of politicians shocking, consider the degree to which law enforcement officers have yielded to Islamist pressure. Last year, when “Undercover Mosque,” an unusually frank exposé on Britain’s Channel 4, showed “moderate” Muslim preachers calling for the beating of wives and daughters and the murder of gays and apostates, police leaped into action—reporting the station to the government communications authority, Ofcom, for stirring up racial hatred. (Ofcom, to its credit, rejected the complaint.) The police reaction, as James Forsyth noted in the Spectator, “revealed a mindset that views the exposure of a problem as more of a problem than the problem itself.” Only days after the “Undercover Mosque” broadcast—in a colossal mark of indifference to the reality that it exposed—Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair announced plans to share antiterrorist intelligence with Muslim community leaders. These plans, fortunately, were later shelved.

Canadian Muslim reformist Irshad Manji has noted that in 2006, when 17 terrorists were arrested in Toronto on the verge of giving Canada “its own 9/11,” “the police did not mention that it had anything to do with Islam or Muslims, not a word.” When, after van Gogh’s murder, a Rotterdam artist drew a street mural featuring an angel and the words thou shalt not kill, police, fearing Muslim displeasure, destroyed the mural (and a videotape of its destruction). In July 2007, a planned TV appeal by British cops to help capture a Muslim rapist was canceled to avoid “racist backlash.” And in August, the Times of London reported that “Asian” men (British code for “Muslims”) in the U.K. were having sex with perhaps hundreds of “white girls as young as twelve”—but that authorities wouldn’t take action for fear of “upsetting race relations.” Typically, neither the Times nor government officials acknowledged that the “Asian” men’s contempt for the “white” girls was a matter not of race but of religion.

Even military leaders aren’t immune. In 2005, columnist Diana West noted that America’s Iraq commander, Lieutenant General John R. Vines, was educating his staff in Islam by giving them a reading list that “whitewashes jihad, dhimmitude and sharia law with the works of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito”; two years later, West noted the unwillingness of a counterinsurgency advisor, Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, to mention jihad. In January 2008, the Pentagon fired Stephen Coughlin, its resident expert on sharia and jihad; reportedly, his acknowledgment that terrorism was motivated by jihad had antagonized an influential Muslim aide. “That Coughlin’s analyses would even be considered ‘controversial,’ ” wrote Andrew Bostom, editor of The Legacy of Jihad, “is pathognomonic of the intellectual and moral rot plaguing our efforts to combat global terrorism.” (Perhaps owing to public outcry, officials announced in February that Coughlin would not be dismissed after all, but instead moved to another Department of Defense position.)

Enough. We need to recognize that the cultural jihadists hate our freedoms because those freedoms defy sharia, which they’re determined to impose on us. So far, they have been far less successful at rolling back freedom of speech and other liberties in the U.S. than in Europe, thanks in no small part to the First Amendment. Yet America is proving increasingly susceptible to their pressures.

The key question for Westerners is: Do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them? Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they’re incapable of defending it when it’s imperiled—or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperiled. As for Muslims living in the West, surveys suggest that many of them, though not actively involved in jihad, are prepared to look on passively—and some, approvingly—while their coreligionists drag the Western world into the House of Submission.

But we certainly can’t expect them to take a stand for liberty if we don’t stand up for it ourselves.

Bruce Bawer is the author of While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. He blogs at BruceBawer.com.

4 November 2006: “Who is our most dangerous enemy? What is the biggest threat to the United States?”

I get asked these two questions quite a bit.

The answers to both questions are close to the same. We, the United States are our biggest enemy to ourselves right now and we are also our own greatest threat. This is because of the disastrous and self destructive way we are handling the threat of Islam.

We are partitioned in this country into two large groups. Those who are dedicated to the preservation and security of this great nation, realizing what it takes and what great sacrifices must be made and then the other group, those that want what deceivingly appears to be the easiest path, are willing to back down to the threat of Islam and think that if we ignore terror and embrace Islam, that terrorism will magically go away. The latter group is placing this country in a precarious position.

This country is in a serious predicament at this precise moment in history. We are being inundated with an all out assault by Islam on multiple fronts. We are fighting this radical cult-like theology on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan while we face the infiltration of our way of life right here in the United States. We are allowing Islamic political organizations to not only infiltrate law enforcement but to dictate policy to our law enforcement agencies although the greatest threat we face is Islamic terrorism. That’s right folks they dictate policy to the very agencies charged with protecting us.

We are allowing Muslims to run for political office which grants them even more power to bring about the downfall of this country. As Islam infiltrates our judicial, legislative and executive branches these bastions and effective tools of Freedom and Democracy will deteriorate in favor of the very religion that has sworn to bring this great country down.

You need to remember a very important statement by the leader of al Qaeda Osama bin Laden who warned us in Arabic and in our own language that Islam would destroy America using our own laws and freedoms against us. He openly warned us and we still don’t take that simple warning seriously. We act as though there is “Good Islam” and “Bad Islam.” Read the Qu’ran, it is all Islam.

For instance, this idiot Ellison shouldn’t even be on the ballot for one simple reason. You cannot serve the interests of the American people and defend the US Constitution while being a true Muslim and following Islamic doctrine. This country stands for freedom and democracy while Islam demands submission, no freedoms and preaches hate, dissent and murder of the very people he is supposed to serve in office. This is the greatest political anomaly of our present time. It defies logic in every aspect. Allowing Ellison to run for office is the exact equivalent of allowing a practicing Nazi to run for office here in the US. What are we thinking?

You do not have to be a genius or a scholar to look around your world and see that anywhere there is Islam there is death and destruction. Look closely at how disastrous the combination of trying to implement and encourage American values of Freedom and Democracy with Islam, Sunni and Shi’ite into one government. It doesn’t work. It leads to death, destruction, mental and emotional slavery and fear. It has to be one or the other as there is no middle ground. There cannot be a compromise between our upstanding western values and those derogatory beliefs of Islam because they directly conflict with each other.

• We believe in freedom of religion, Islam teaches its followers to refuse to co-exist with other religions

• We believe that the people have a say in the government and the ability to vote, improve and change what they don’t like in the system, Islam states that Sharia law will govern the people and the country

• We as Americans love life, true Muslims desire death for themselves and others

• We believe that races and cultures have a right to exist, Islam calls for the elimination of an entire race of people, the Jewish people

• We believe in the power of negotiations, Islam demands submission

• We treat our women with love and respect with equal rights and privileges, Islam sees them as possessions with no more value than a farm animal

• We allow Muslims to worship in their mosques, in Islamic countries Christian churches are burned, Christians are murdered at will in the street

I can go on and on as to the pitfalls of this Islamic disease. The problem is that we as Americans are allowing this death like cult to “force” its way into our society, into our government and most are not aware of the huge price tag that this country will pay by allowing this to continue. The price tag is death.

Before some jerk emails me and calls me a racist I want to make this real clear to everyone. Before September 11, 2001 I didn’t have a real problem with Islam and Muslims. Since that day when those nineteen Islamic murderers came into our country with a direct assault on our country and our citizens, rejoiced over it, condoned it and wished that more death had been achieved, that is when I took a real issue with Islam and everything related to this worldwide fascist revolution.

Islam’s rhetorical defense of what happened on 9/11 is no defense. We were not in Iraq and Afghanistan on September 11, 2001. The old standby terrorism justification excuse of “The plight of the poor people of Palestine” is pure crap as they bring all their troubles on themselves. The Palestinians have openly stated that they refuse to co-exist with Israel and anything that resembles pursuit of negotiations on that subject is an exercise in futility.

We were buying the Middle Eastern products, we stopped the genocide of Muslim people in Bosnia and many, many decades ago we taught the Muslims countries how to get the oil out of the ground and into the market place so their countries could prosper and we could buy oil. We have fed Muslims, provided medical care to Muslims and provided Muslims with technology so they could become self sufficient and viable countries in the world. We made you.

Even that horse’s ass Osama bin Laden wouldn’t have had his $200,000,000.00 fortune if not for western influence, dollars and technology. His money came from his family’s construction business, which resulted from the oil business which resulted from western technology. He has no justification for his actions and he is a disgrace to his “Allah”.

That is just one of the many hypocrisies of Islam. Islam throughout history has bitten the hand that fed it. So why in the world would anyone want to assist Islam is their quest to destroy our country and why would anyone think that they will not continue to bite the hand that feeds them? They bring absolutely nothing of value to the political structure of our democratic society with their suicidal ways, refusal to co-exist with others and hate for all mankind that isn’t Islam. They have nothing to offer as the dominating force they are trying to be in our country. We as a country have enough of our own problems even as a democratic society without the poison of Sharia law infiltrating the system. There is not one ounce of proof of anything positive that has been offered by Islam to this country to date.

Islam doesn’t ask to be accepted and co-exist, they insist on not only being accepted but they are trying to change our way of life to fit their theology of Nazism.

You want to be a Muslim in my country, that’s fine. Be a Catholic, be a Protestant, Mormon, Buddhist, Hindu or an atheist. Be like others here. Do your thing. Worship your prophets as you will, worship your God. Feel free to start your own churches, drink the kool-aid all together on that last day. But do not try to take over my country because I do not want you, your “religion” or your Sharia law in the dominant position here. We are Americans, we co-exist, we communicate, we make decisions on how we will live. We answer to our God and versions of God in our own ways. We are comprised of Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Buddhists, Hindus, and multiple variations within those religions. We all have one thing in common. We are not conspiring to kill fellow Americans and overthrow the US government as we all have found a beautiful place of coexistence between our religions. That place is the United States of America.

Do it the right way, the peaceful way and fit into our land of opportunity for all man, into our gracious, open society or get out. If you are leaving, today would be good.

WASHINGTON — Terrorist groups in Iraq are stepping up their efforts to spark more deadly sectarian violence as a way of influencing how Americans will vote on Nov. 7, Vice President Dick Cheney alleged Monday in a FOX News interview in which he warned Americans not to fall for suggestions the War on Terror is losing ground in Iraq.

“Whether it’sAl Qaedaor the other elements that are active in Iraq, they are betting on the proposition they can break the will of the American people. They think we won’t have the stomach for the fight long-term,” Cheney told FOX News’ Neil Cavuto.

Cheney added that terrorists are “very, very cognizant of our schedule if you will,” though “they specifically can’t beat us in a stand-up fight. They never have.”

Cheney said the terrorists, who are sophisticated in their use of the Internet and know how to manipulate public opinion, are trying to win the War on Terror by demoralizing the U.S. public.

“They know that the way they win is if they can, in fact, force America to withdraw on the basis that we aren’t going to stay and finish the job, their basic proposition that they can break the will of the American people. That’s what they believe. And that’s what they’re trying to do,” he said.

Cheney also was asked about comments he made last week on a North Dakota radio station in which he was asked whether he’d condone dunking a terror suspect in water if it would save lives — an interrogation torture technique known as waterboarding, which mimics drowning.

Cheney called it a “no-brainer.”

Critics pounced on the vice president for suggesting that he sanctioned waterboarding. The detainee interrogation bill signed by the president last week prohibits CIA‘s use torture, but does not list waterboarding in a list of banned activities.

Asked again by FOX News whether the use of waterboarding was an appropriate interrogation tool, Cheney sidestepped the question by saying he does not discuss specific methods.

On next week’s election, Cheney said that despite the polls and predictions to the contrary, Republicans will maintain control of both chambers of Congress.

He also offered a positive outlook on the economy despite the latest reports that show some weakness in the housing sector, reduced gross domestic product last quarter and other indicators, and said economic successes would be endangered if Democrats take control after Nov. 7.

Hammering home a GOP theme, Cheney said the most liberal Democrats would be in charge if the House majority changes. He cited Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, who is in line to take the chairmanship of the powerful Ways and Means Committee if Democrats win control of the House.

“Charlie has said there’s not a single one of the Bush tax cuts he thinks should be extended. And he could achieve that objective simply by not acting. Unless there’s an affirmative action by Congress, legislation passed to keep those rates low, those rates are going back up, and he’d have a massive tax increase,” Cheney said.

As for his own future, Cheney did not budge on his position that he will not run for president if he were nominated and would not serve if elected.

The vice president did offer support for his wife, Lynne Cheney, who took on CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in an interview last week that was supposed to be on the second lady’s latest book.

Referring to a network special earlier this month that showed terrorists attacking U.S. forces, Lynne Cheney asked the anchor why the network was “running terrorist tape of terrorists shooting Americans.”

“Why are you running terrorist propaganda?” she asked.

Cheney said he didn’t encourage his wife to take a stand, but that he was proud of her.

“I thought it was great. We refer to it around the house as the ‘slapdown.’ And she was very tough, but she was very accurate and very aggressive … So she spoke her mind, and I thought it was perfectly appropriate,” Cheney said.

It’s always hard to pinpoint when a historic shift takes place. It is rarely as easy as Martin Luther’s posting of his 95 thesis that launched the Reformation and loosed the grip of the Catholic Church on the governance of Europe or when Henry VIII pushed Rome out of England to create the Anglican Church.

When, however, did the tiny Muslim community in America, estimated to be between two and three million—by contrast there are some six million Jews in America—begin to assert its takeover? I am going to mark it from October 19, 2006 when the Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest circulation daily, ran an article, “She’s got it covered: Designer seeks to dress the style-conscious Muslim woman” in its feature news section.

“Many Muslim women wear hijab as an expression of the Islamic tradition of modesty,” noted the article about a 27-year old American Muslim fashion designer. Born to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, she had converted to Islam as a student at New York University after she married her husband, a Muslim.

When the media begin to find ways to offer up a positive image of Islam, you know they have probably decided that the game is over and we in the West have lost. The American media is expert at showing the white flag of surrender. They have been trumpeting the end of the world for decades now.

Wrong about the Soviet Union right up to the day it imploded. Wrong about the predictions that the Earth could not sustain six billion people. Wrong about the availability of mineral and energy resources. Wrong about global warming. Wrong about cutting taxes. Wrong about the current excellent state of the U.S. economy.

And now the surrender-addicts are ready, like our European cousins, to concede that Western civilization should just roll over and give up in the face of the worldwide Islamic jihad.

Europeans stopped attending Europe’s churches and stopped having enough babies to replace themselves in favor of creating totally unsustainable welfare states. Instead, they imported millions Muslims to do the work they became too old or too lazy to do themselves.

The United States, too, has created a cradle-to-grave socialist system that is going broke at an alarming rate even while the economy is thriving. The Bush administration is conspiring with Canada and Mexico to erase our national borders in order to create a North American Union that will throw our national sovereignty down the rat-hole of a vast bureaucracy that will not have to be responsive to those awful American voters.

As Mark Steyn says in his brilliant new book, America Alone, “We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for good or ill, shaped the age we live in.”

The British, part of the European Union, should have paid heed in 1990 when “The Muslim Manifesto: A Strategy for Survival” was promulgated to create the Council of British Muslims to act as “a Muslim parliament” in a nation that gave us the Magna Carta, detailing the rules of property rights and individual freedoms. These days, the nations with the least amount of freedom are predominately Muslim.

Britain’s Muslim Manifesto made it clear that “Political and cultural subservience goes against their grain” because “at its inception Islam created a political platform from which Muslims were to launch themselves on a global role as founders of great states, empires and a world civilization and culture.”

Why should an article in a leading U.S. newspaper mark the beginning of the end? According to the UK’s Muslim Manifesto, “The fact is that a Muslim woman cannot be a western woman.” The problem for Muslims in Great Britain was that “There are laws on the British Statute Book that are in direct conflict with the laws of Allah.”

“We are Muslims first and last.”

“Jihad is a basic requirement of Islam and living in Britain or having British nationality by birth or naturalization does not absolve the Muslim from his or her duty to participate in jihad: this participation can be active service in armed struggle abroad and/or the provision of material and moral support to those engaged in such struggle anywhere in the world.”

“Islam is our guide in all situations.”

Ultimately this became clear to the non-Muslim citizens of England when on July 7, 2005, born-and-bred Muslim British citizens killed some of them in London’s subways and buses. This year in August it scared a lot of people to learn that British Muslims were planning to destroy ten commercial airliners and kill thousands of travelers.

Assimilation, according to the Manifesto, wasn’t even an option. Why need it be? By the early 1990s, there were already about 1,000 mosques in Great Britain, many of them former Anglican churches that had been abandoned and sold to Muslims.

As is the case of France today, the Manifesto recommended that “The Muslim community may have to define ‘no go’ areas where the exercise of ‘freedom of speech’ against Islam will not be tolerated.”

In the now famous words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and they are us.” If America, the lone superpower, does not hold out against the march of Islam, it will fall into the Dark Ages of Muslim control, a place where born-and-bred Americans like the fashion designer will determine what American women will wear and other Muslims will impose the Sharia law of Islam upon all of us.

The next time you want to mock the “fundamentalist” Christians, famed for their patriotism, think again.

The next time you shrug when you hear your local school system has banned the playing or singing of Christmas carols, think again.

The next time you are inclined to say or think unkind things about American or Israeli Jews, think again.

The next time your neighborhood, community or city yields to some new Islamic demand to conform to their “religious” rules, think again.

The next time you read demands that something not be published or aired in America because it offends Muslim sensibilities, think again.

The next time anyone tells you that Islam preaches tolerance or peace, think again.

This is how nations and ultimately western civilization will slip-slide into a world no American would ever want for their children and grandchildren.

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs”, posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, http://www.anxietycenter.com. His new book, “Right Answers: Separating Fact from Fantasy” has been published by Merril Press.

The Rape of Europe

The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (12 October) that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: “We are watching the world of yesterday.”

Europe is turning Muslim. As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. “I am too old,” he said. However, he urged young people to get out and “move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable.”

Many Germans and Dutch, apparently, did not wait for Broder’s advice. The number of emigrants leaving the Netherlands and Germany has already surpassed the number of immigrants moving in. One does not have to be prophetic to predict, like Henryk Broder, that Europe is becoming Islamic. Just consider the demographics. The number of Muslims in contemporary Europe is estimated to be 50 million. It is expected to double in twenty years. By 2025, one third of all European children will be born to Muslim families. Today Mohammed is already the most popular name for new-born boys in Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and other major European cities.

Broder is convinced that the Europeans are not willing to oppose islamization. “The dominant ethos,” he told De Volkskrant, “is perfectly voiced by the stupid blonde woman author with whom I recently debated. She said that it is sometimes better to let yourself be raped than to risk serious injuries while resisting. She said it is sometimes better to avoid fighting than run the risk of death.”

In a recent op-ed piece in the Brussels newspaper De Standaard (23 October) the Dutch (gay and self-declared “humanist”) author Oscar Van den Boogaard refers to Broder’s interview. Van den Boogaard says that to him coping with the islamization of Europe is like “a process of mourning.” He is overwhelmed by a “feeling of sadness.” “I am not a warrior,” he says, “but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

As Tom Bethell wrote in this month’s American Spectator: “Just at the most basic level of demography the secular-humanist option is not working.” But there is more to it than the fact that non-religious people tend not to have as many children as religious people, because many of them prefer to “enjoy” freedom rather than renounce it for the sake of children. Secularists, it seems to me, are also less keen on fighting. Since they do not believe in an afterlife, this life is the only thing they have to lose. Hence they will rather accept submission than fight. Like the German feminist Broder referred to, they prefer to be raped than to resist.

“If faith collapses, civilization goes with it,” says Bethell. That is the real cause of the closing of civilization in Europe. Islamization is simply the consequence. The very word Islam means “submission” and the secularists have submitted already. Many Europeans have already become Muslims, though they do not realize it or do not want to admit it.

Some of the people I meet in the U.S. are particularly worried about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. They are correct when they fear that anti-Semitism is also on the rise among non-immigrant Europeans. The latter hate people with a fighting spirit. Contemporary anti-Semitism in Europe (at least when coming from native Europeans) is related to anti-Americanism. People who are not prepared to resist and are eager to submit, hate others who do not want to submit and are prepared to fight. They hate them because they are afraid that the latter will endanger their lives as well. In their view everyone must submit.

This is why they have come to hate Israel and America so much, and the small band of European “islamophobes” who dare to talk about what they see happening around them. West Europeans have to choose between submission (islam) or death. I fear, like Broder, that they have chosen submission – just like in former days when they preferred to be red rather than dead.

“Youths” torch buses around Paris

The intifada continues in France. And this latest round of bus attacks shows that it is spreading to previously unexpected places. “Youths torch buses around Paris,” by Cecile Brisson for AP:

PARIS – Youths forced passengers off three buses and set them on fire overnight in suburban Paris, raising tensions Thursday ahead of the first anniversary of the riots that engulfed France’s rundown, heavily immigrant neighborhoods.

No injuries were reported, but worried bus drivers refused to enter some suburbs after dark, and the prime minister urged a swift, stern response.

The riots in October 2005 raged through housing projects in suburbs nationwide, springing in part from anger over entrenched discrimination against immigrants and their French-born children, many of them Muslims from former French colonies in Africa. Despite an influx of funds and promises, disenchantment still thrives in those communities.

About 10 attackers — five of them with handguns — stormed a bus in Montreuil east of Paris early Thursday and forced the passengers off, the RATP transport authority said. They then drove off and set the bus on fire.

Late Wednesday, three attackers forced passengers off another bus in Athis-Mons, south of Paris, and tossed a Molotov cocktail inside, police officials said. The driver managed to put out the fire. Elsewhere, between six and 10 youths herded passengers off a bus in the western suburb of Nanterre late Wednesday and set it alight.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said the events “should lead to an immediate response.”

“We cannot accept the unacceptable,” he told reporters in the northern suburb of Cergy-Pontoise. “There will be arrests. … That is our responsibility.”

Villepin also said efforts should be directed to “revitalize” troubled neighborhoods, and repeated the government’s insistence that authorities rid France of “lawless zones” where youth gangs operate.

The overnight attacks and recent ambushes on police have raised concern about the changing character of suburban violence, which is seemingly more premeditated than last year’s spontaneous outcry and no longer restricted to the housing projects. The use of handguns was unusual — last year’s rioters were armed primarily with crowbars, stones, sticks or gasoline bombs.

Regional authorities said the Nanterre bus line, which passes near Paris’ financial district, had not been considered at a high risk of attack. Francois Saglier, director of bus service at the RATP, said the attacks happened “without prior warning and not necessarily in neighborhoods considered difficult.”

[…]

The transit authority in the Essonne region south of Paris on Wednesday suspended nighttime bus service for security reasons following “multiple incidents,” including a tear gas bomb.

France’s inability to better integrate minorities and recent violence against police are becoming major political issues as the campaign heats up for next year’s presidential and parliamentary elections.

Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, who is considering whether to run for president, said that attacks demonstrate “a desire to kill.”

“Some individuals are looking for provocations, and sometimes go further,” she said on i-Tele television. She acknowledged people facing unemployment and living in overcrowded housing projects “have trouble finding their place” in society.

In an article in the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh, columnist Fares bin Hazam reports that both preachers in mosques and online propaganda are inciting young Muslims to wage jihad. [1] An interview with a young Muslim who went to fight in Afghanistan, also in Al-Riyadh, provides first-hand testimony confirming this claim.

The following are excerpts from the article and the interview:

Bin Hazam writes in his article: “The business with Afghanistan will never end as long as the ‘duty of jihad’ continues to live in [our] society, in mosques, in Friday [sermons], and on the Internet…

“After the fall of the Taliban and the subsequent Guantanamo crisis… there was increasing talk about the need to investigate our youth’s growing [inclination] towards jihad, and about the need to search for the reasons that motivate them to go to Afghanistan and to other countries…

“The call to investigate these reasons is despicable; it is a tasteless joke. [One might think] that the reasons are unknown, that we are not aware of our situation [and need to conduct an] investigation in order to discover why [our young people] went forth and are still going forth [to wage jihad]… The reasons are obvious. Many of us know them, and there is no need for a scientific study or for any other [kind of study] to reveal them…

“Since the causes are known, do we lack courage to deal with [this problem]? [I believe that] we do. Our lack of courage has been apparent ever since we invented the excuse of ‘external [influences],’ and began to toy with it and wave it at every opportunity. I do not know where these [external influences] come from, since it was we who sent our young men [to Afghanistan] in the first place, before we ever heard of [these influences] that allegedly come [from outside].

“Some preachers, [namely] those who fear the censor, deceive him by being implicit in their incitement to [wage] jihad in Iraq or Afghanistan. They speak in their sermons about the merits of jihad without mentioning a particular region. They speak in general terms that can be applied to any location, even to our [own] country. During the prayer, the details start to pour in thick and fast: first, [a call to wage jihad] in Palestine, [which serve as] a smokescreen, and then [calls for jihad] in Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya, and finally… the call ‘oh Allah, grant them victory everywhere!’ ‘Everywhere’ includes our [own] country… and we say ‘amen’ after the preacher calls [upon Allah] to help the mujahideen in our [own] country…”

Saudi Released From Guantanamo: Fatwas Prompted Me to Join the Jihad

Sa’d Ibrahim Al-Bidna, a young Saudi, traveled to Afghanistan with the aim of joining the jihad. He was arrested two months later, and spent four years and eight months at Guantanamo. In an interview with Al-Riyadh, he said that it was fatwas posted on the Internet that motivated him to wage jihad.

Al-Riyadh: “Tell us of your journey, from [the time] you left Saudi Arabia until your return.”

Al-Bidna: “I started this exhausting journey when I left Saudi Arabia on my own, motivated by youthful enthusiasm to [wage] jihad for the sake of Allah in Afghanistan. I traveled to Afghanistan through Syria and Iran. [When I arrived], war was being waged against the Taliban and things were not clear to me. So I decided to leave Afghanistan for Pakistan, and from there to return to Saudi Arabia. But [when I reached] Pakistan, I was arrested and turned over to the American forces. [They] imprisoned me in Guantanamo, [where I remained] until the Saudi authorities intervened and brought me back to Saudi Arabia after years of suffering…”

Al-Riyadh: “Tell us about the beginning of your journey and the reasons [that motivated you] to set out for Afghanistan.”

Al-Bidna: “Many may find it difficult to believe, but I was not very devout, though I did pray regularly. But enthusiasm and zeal filled the hearts of many young people, and unfortunately, I followed certain fatwas that were posted on the Internet. [These fatwas] call upon young people to wage jihad in certain regions. They tempt them [by describing] the great reward [they will receive], the status of the martyrs in Paradise and the virgins that await them [there]. These fatwas have great influence on young people who have no awareness or knowledge [that enables them] to examine them and verify their validity.”

In Afghanistan, I Saw Muslims Fighting Muslims, and That is Why I Left

Al-Riyadh: “When you came to Afghanistan, did you find the notion of jihad to be as you had imagined it…?”

Al-Bidna: “When I arrived, the war against the Taliban was at its height. There were constant bombardments and things were not clear to me, especially since I was only there for two months. This is not enough time to understand how things really are. But what concerned me the most was that Muslims were fighting each other, and that is why I left [and went to] Pakistan – for in jihad, a Muslim must never fight his Muslim brother.”

Al-Riyadh: “Based on your experience, did you feel that there was no real jihad in Afghanistan?”

Al-Bidna: “The [brief] period I spent there did not enable me see the full picture, and I did not have the knowledge to distinguish real jihad from other actions that are [only] called jihad. But I did see that there were devout people there. Some of them were young men who came [to Afghanistan] out of youthful enthusiasm and [due to their] scant religious knowledge, or were influenced by certain fatwas published by various religious scholars, or [were influenced by] by false images, which were not free of exaggeration, of the situation in Afghanistan. This was the kind of thing that prompted me to set out without informing or asking my family, and without considering the concept of legitimate jihad, its conditions and its rules.”

Al-Riyadh: “Today, do you feel that you were wrong to set out [to Afghanistan], obeying some irresponsible fatwas?”

Al-Bidna: “Of course. I [now] understand that I was wrong. I should have asked the leaders for permission to set out [and wage jihad], or religious scholars known for their knowledge and piety, of which there are many in our country…”

Al-Riyadh: “Before you left for Afghanistan, was there anyone who urged you and encouraged you to go?”

Al-Bidna: “I did not belong to any group or organization, especially since I was not devout before I left. But there were obviously some fatwas that called [for jihad] and were posted on certain websites. [They] influenced many young men, both devout and [non-devout]…”

Had I Received Proper Guidance Before I Left for Afghanistan, I Would Not Have Gone

Al-Riyadh: “After returning [to Saudi Arabia], did you meet with the counseling committees? What changed in your way of thinking?”

Al-Bidna: “My views began to change when I saw the real picture and understood my error, [even] before I was captured. When I returned to Saudi Arabia, we [i.e. the prisoners released from Guantanamo] met with sheikhs and religious scholars who taught us a great deal, and who enlightened us on the tolerant directives of Islam. Had I [known all this] before I left, I would not have gone. The discussions with the religious scholars and sheikhs gave us the ability to distinguish truth from error, and set us on the right path.”

Al-Riyadh: “From your experience, are there specific reasons that cause young people to adopt deviant views and carry out terrorist actions?”

Al-Bidna: “Of course there are specific reasons [that motivate] young people, especially unemployment, the desire for self-fulfillment, and [having] free time. I, for example, finished [only] elementary school, and sat around without a job for many years prior to leaving for Afghanistan. Such things can cause young people to go astray, especially when there are [people] who feed them erroneous notions…”

Al-Riyadh: “Do you think that a fatwa posted online can prompt a young person to wage jihad, when he does not know for sure whether the fatwa is valid?”

Al-Bidna: “There is no doubt that the problem lies in the youth’s enthusiasm [coupled with] scant knowledge. That’s what happened with me. I did not think to verify the validity of these fatwas or to consult with anyone, and [consequently] made a big mistake…”